Word: ups
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Within a few months, Omidyar was ready to take eBay up a notch. He brought in a partner with the business background he lacked: Jeff Skoll, a friend and Stanford M.B.A., then working in e-commerce for Knight Ridder. Together they began to bring in more employees--techies, customer-support...
Industrial players are also getting in on the online-auction craze, driving down the cost of equipment by bidding to buy it directly from suppliers. There are business-to-business sites for construction equipment ironmall.com and for farm machinery like cotton pickers farmbid.com) Bulk quantities of latex paint are up...
But online auctions are shaking up the way America does business. People are quitting their day jobs and finding they can support themselves entirely by selling on eBay and other auction sites. Traditional retailers are significantly augmenting their revenue by selling on eBay, and some are shutting down their stores...
...site's domain name was www.ebay.com and eBay was the name that stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided to start charging. He concocted a fee scale similar to the one eBay uses today: a nominal fee for listing an item (10[cents] back then, as little as 25[cents] now) and a percent...
The payments that arrived with Omidyar's daily mail were small--in some cases dimes and nickels taped to index cards. But those little payments were coming in piles. eBay took in $1,000 the first month, more than it cost to run. Omidyar really knew he was onto something...